


there are many names in history (but none of them are ours)

by ceserabeau



Series: Avengers AU [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Marvel Avengers Fusion, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-25
Updated: 2014-04-25
Packaged: 2018-01-20 19:30:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1522874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceserabeau/pseuds/ceserabeau
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lydia is not her real name, that much she knows for certain.<br/>No, <i>Lydia</i> comes later, after a soldier scoops her up out of the snow and holds her close as her old life burns to ash around her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there are many names in history (but none of them are ours)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Richard Siken's [Little Beast](http://theysaid.livejournal.com/835680.html). All his work is beautiful, go read it.

Lydia is not her real name, that much she knows for certain. It is not a sound she knows from her memories; it doesn’t fit alongside her mother’s gentle hands and her father’s gruff voice.

No, _Lydia_ comes later, after a soldier scoops her up out of the snow and holds her close as her old life burns to ash around her.

-

The Red Room is no place for children, but she is no longer a child.

 _Lidochka_ they call her here, a new name for a new recruit. She takes it gladly, let’s them erase everything from before and rebuild her in their image.

She is a blank slate and in endless corridors, behind endless doors, she learns many things. Languages, dozens upon dozens, repeating them over and over so the sounds fall from her tongue like she was born speaking them. Weaponry: knives and guns and everything in between, her body included, until she can use them all without a thought. Pain, how to give and how to receive, and when she demonstrates exceptional talent at destroying minds as she destroys bodies they praise her for her skill.

It is obvious she is their favourite; ten years old and already deadly, carefully built and honed to perfection. The other girls grow jealous; once her friends, now they watch her angrily, refuse to speak with her in the dark of their dorm room.

She has no use for their emotions; it makes them weak and that is not a word that has been used to describe her in a long time.

-

When she is sixteen a man is brought to train them. _Winter Soldier_ , the other girls whisper to each other, but she watches him silently from across the room.

He’s young, younger than she would have thought for someone with a reputation such as his, but she can see from the way he holds himself that he’s more than a little dangerous. She recognises the fighting stance, the forced casualness to his body; it is the way she stands herself. His arm catches her eye: the gleaming metal, the way the joints shine in the low light. There, on the shoulder: the red star, the symbol of their homeland. Then he glances up and where all the others look away, she holds his gaze for a long moment, lets him see her watching.

The smile that twists his lips makes unexpected heat jolt through her, and from the way his eyes darken she isn’t quick enough to hide her blush.

The man examines all the girls in turn, one by one, until she is the only one left. The trainers make her show off her skills: dancing and shooting and throwing, and after that her flexibility and agility and strength. He barely blinks as she moves back and forth, eyes trained on her figure, careful and calculating. When she is finished, she watches him watching her, his heavy gaze a steady weight on her shoulders, and waits for judgement to be passed.

“She will be the next Black Widow,” the trainer says, more statement than question, and the Winter Soldier nods.

-

Lidochka is trained by a legend. His name is spoken in hushed tones, a whisper on the lips of nervous recruits as if speaking it will summon him. She understands their fear: from a distance, he is a giant, a monster.

Up close, he is just a man.

“Do you have any questions?” the man asks when her training schedule has been explained.

She shakes her head, but later when he’s laying out guns for her to assemble, she asks, “What’s your name?”

The Soldier smiles like she’s told a joke. “Stanislaw,” he tells her, before he leans in close enough that his breath tickles the curve of her ear. “But you can call me Stas.”

She calls him that, but only when the trainers aren’t looking. The rest of the time he is _sir_. In return he doesn’t call her by her name, instead giving her nicknames: _ptichka_ , _kotyonok_ , before he settles on a new one.

“Solnyshko,” he says in a low voice, as he traps her under him on the mat. “You’re getting better.”

She just smiles at him, all teeth, and bucks him off.

But he keeps using the name, a secret shared between them. In the Red Room the only secrets are those that can be pried from the lips of prisoners or spilled to maintain favour. So she keeps this one for herself, tucks it away somewhere safe to savour it when she has to return to the darkness of her bunk.

-

She is the Black Widow now and it is a title she wears gladly.

Time trickles by. One year turns into two turns into ten turns into twenty. There’s a war in Vietnam and a missile crisis in Cuba. The hammer and sickle spreads across Europe and America rises in the West.

She meets him again, her Soldier, and he looks exactly as she remembers.

“Solnyshko,” he says in her ear as they stroll in the Parisian afternoon, “So good to see you again.”

The name trips from his mouth as perfectly as the first time, and she curls into his side, her body tucked up against his. They fit together like puzzle pieces, she thinks, like a key into a lock, like a clip into a gun.

Everything is perfect, unbelievably so, until one night under a cloak of darkness it falls apart.

Their target is a diplomat, a defector; a dead man. Stas has the shot lined up and she gives the order, but one second passes, two, three. He doesn’t pull the trigger. So she unloads two bullets into the target’s head herself and runs for the exit.

“It was a mistake,” he says later, as she carefully wipes down the surfaces of their safe house. “Don’t report it.”

She shakes her head at him. “I already have,” she says, and fear flits across his face.

She sees him move before he does it, his panic making his actions obvious. He makes for the door, but she tackles him onto the ground, cracks his head against the floor. He fights back of course, breaks her wrist, bloodies her nose. But once she gets her taser into where his arm meets his body, it’s all over. He drops like a stone.

She sits beside him on the cold floor, arms wrapped around her legs, and waits. Their handlers come soon enough, black clothed agents with glinting needles. As they strap the cuffs on him, he begins to stir. The eyes that slide open are full of betrayal.

“Et tu, Brute?” the Soldier whispers to her, and her heart skips at the sound of his voice as the words fall from his lips.

-

1991 and the USSR collapses in on itself like a house of cards. When the dust settles she is halfway across the world. Nothing ties her to her homeland, nothing except a name, and her sixty-five years of loyalty have left her nothing to show but hands soaked in blood.

She takes the title her makers gave her and uses it to carve out a place for herself in the new world. The Black Widow is the best of the best, the worst of the worst, and she is glorious.

-

Lidochka dies with the Soviet Union, and so she takes a new name to match her new accent: Lydia Martin, a testament to both her recent past and her ancient.

But where Lidochka’s only enemies were those of her country, Lydia Martin’s enemies are numerous and growing. Not everyone likes having someone like her running around unsupervised, and none more than SHIELD.

 _A pain in your ass_ , Stas would say.

They send an agent after her, an archer, a girl who looks Lydia’s age but couldn’t possibly be. She corners Lydia in a warehouse, and when Lydia finds herself in the archer’s sights she feels tired instead of scared.

She hears the twang of the bow only when the arrow goes through her chest. The momentum propels her back, over the cold metal of the balcony. It’s a short drop.

When she hits the floor she feels something in her back break, T4 vertebrae, and if she were anyone else she’d never walk again. Her lungs are filling up with her own blood; she can taste it on her tongue and knows death is coming soon. Above her the archer moves in the shadows, slipping down and down until she looms over Lydia, a grim reaper finally come to collect.

“You’re the Black Widow,” the archer says, and Lydia laughs wetly.

“What’s in a name?” she asks, choking on her own blood, and blacks out to the confused look on the girl’s face.

-

The girl is Agent Allison Argent, and Lydia would laugh at the alliteration if she didn’t know that this girl is also Hawkeye, her hunter.

“I was sent to kill you,” Allison tells her, voice whisper-soft as the jet soars over an ocean.

Lydia tilts her head, momentarily confused. “Why didn’t you?”

Allison doesn’t speak. Lydia tests her shackles again; they chafe against the top of her wrist, her flexor retinaculum. The jet hums beneath her feet, a low drone that lulls her in ways the echoing halls of the Red Room never could.

Eventually Allison takes a breath, a slow inhale, and fixes her dark eyes on Lydia. “You’re more than just the Black Widow,” Allison says, and Lydia tries not to squirm under her steady gaze.

-

At SHIELD, she has many names.

Some are familiar to her: _Agent_ , her superiors call her; _Black Widow_ , the rookies whisper after her; _Martin_ , her colleagues shout across the hangar. Sometimes someone says _Lydia_ , sometimes _Lidochka_ , sometimes a mass of syllables that might be her birth name. There are a thousand variations, all sounded out in different accents, mouths tripping over vowels and consonants to pronounce the words. But none sound quite right to her ears though, no matter how often she hears them.

There is one name she keeps close, tucked away next to her heart like a secret, the sound that fills her with longing. It is a name she never expects to hear again, until a man with deathly pale skin and a metal arm opens his eyes in a dingy interrogation room.

“ _Solnyshko_ ,” the Winter Soldier whispers, and the world drops out from under her feet.

**Author's Note:**

> Part of an Avengers AU, because apparently I’m doing that now. 
> 
> Translations: _ptichka_ = small bird, _kotyonok_ = kitten, _solnyshko_ = little sun


End file.
